West Irvine

The City of Irvine publishes West Irvine as a named village in its own boundary layer, two polygons totaling 410.6 acres, and files the whole of it inside Planning Area 4, which the city calls Lower Peters Canyon after the neighboring village this site publishes as Northpark. The two village polygons do not touch at any point, so a parcel belongs to one or the other and never to both, and a lookup by planning area alone cannot tell a West Irvine address from a Northpark one. Two master associations divide the ground in the City's HOA record: West Irvine Master Homeowners Assn., 96.3 acres across five polygons under Crummack Huseby Property Management, and Sheridan Master Assn., 31.5 acres across two under Powerstone Property Management. Five sub-associations sit beneath them, four under the first at Wisteria, Mandeville, Andover and Summerplace and one under the second at Sheridan Place, each with its own management company, so the monthly cost of an address is a master assessment plus a sub-association assessment. Together the two masters cover 127.8 acres, 31.1 percent of the village, and the City records no association boundary over the remaining 69 percent, so an address inside the village line is not by itself evidence that the home carries a master assessment at all.

Public recreation here sits on City land. The parks layer records three neighborhood parks inside the village, 9.1 acres in all. Valencia Park covers 6 acres at 3081 Trevino Dr with a children's play area, an open play area, a soccer field, a trail, restrooms, a drinking fountain and a picnic area with four tables. Homestead Park covers 2.1 acres at 8 Cliffwood with three tennis courts, a children's play area, an open play area, a trail, restrooms and a picnic area with four tables. Comstock Park covers 1 acre at 5 Countryside Dr with a basketball court, a children's play area, an open play area, restrooms and a picnic area with three tables. All three are city facilities funded outside any assessment, and neither master association publishes an amenity list of its own, so no pool or clubhouse count appears anywhere on this page. The schools are Tustin Unified rather than Irvine Unified, which is the single fact about this village buyers most often have wrong: Myford Elementary at 3181 Trevino Drive, a block from Valencia Park on the same street, then Pioneer Middle School in Tustin, then Arnold O. Beckman High School.

In 1899 a group of sportsmen from Orange and Santa Ana leased ground in the canyon from the Irvine Company and the Santiago Golf Club laid out a nine-hole course, the first golf course in Orange County. The greens were oil-soaked sand and the fairways were native soil, and a red clubhouse stood on a ridge conspicuous enough from the road between the El Modena grade and Irvine Regional Park that people took to calling the place Golf Canyon. The Irvine Company built the upper reservoir in 1931 and the lower one in 1940, and during the Second World War the Army ran a training area called Camp Commander in the eucalyptus groves by the lower basin, staging mock battles against a nearby Army post. On 3 March 1992 the company dedicated 340 acres of the canyon to the County of Orange as open space.

Housing came last. The Irvine Company dates the village of West Irvine to 1997, and it went up on the canyon floor in separate builder pockets rather than as one tract, which is why the village is run by several associations under a master rather than by one. It covers about 411 acres and connects to the 22-mile Mountains to Sea Trail, which follows the canyon it was built in.